2010/02 : ezyang's blog

Classes begin February 3, 2010

And so classes begin this Spring Term of 2010. The classes that I am currently signed up to take are:

6.005: Software Construction
6.02: Intro to EECS II
6.045: Automata, Computing and Complexity
6.945: Large-scale Symbolic Systems
21M.283: Musicals of Stage and Screen

6.945 is the “fun” class of the semester; I expect to have to sink a lot of time into and get a lot out of it in return. 6.005 and 6.02 are strictly being taken because my degree requires it (I’ve scheduled 6.02 as a conflict class on top of 6.945, so I’ll probably have to do a little more legwork to make sure I get all the material for that class.) 6.045 is my mathematical class for the semester; no pure course 18 class for me, unfortunately! And on the advice of Robert Jacobs, 21M.283 is my HASS-ish class (I’m quite pleased that I’ve gotten the HASS-D requirement out of the way).

Cute macro tricks in the kernel February 1, 2010

A classic stylistic tip given to C programmers is that inline functions should be preferred over macros, when possible. This advice stems from the fact that a macro and an inline function can achieve the same effect, but the inline function also gets type checking.

As it turns out, you can achieve static type checking with macros, if you’re willing to resort to the same cute trick that this following snippet from the Linux kernel uses: